Coaching & Mentoring

Have you considered securing the services of a mentor or coach as tool for your personal and professional development. What are the benefits of coaching or mentoring, and how can you achieve the best outcome?

Leaders are under great pressure to produce results at a faster pace, using fewer resources with many more options to choose from. Coaching is the smart way to deal with these pressures. When leaders coach, they support their team to get more and better work done. But it's hard for leaders to coach when everyday pressures seem all-consuming. Finding the time to coach seems to be just another challenge.

In our obsession with social media metrics - followers, likes, connections, reach, Klout, and so on - it's easy to forget that the people who will make the biggest difference to you are the small group you already have trusted relationships with. Treat them with respect and they will be more powerful than all the shallow connections at the edge of your network.

Competitive advantage - the Holy Grail of business success. Is it about technology, new product development, the illusive innovation, working lean, or great marketing? What makes the difference to winning more often, is how your team performs as a whole. How do you achieve this? In a word - coaching.

What exactly does it mean to be a "great coach"? I talk with leaders all the time who tell me that they have been coaching for many, many years and they don't need any more training on how to be a great coach. But just because you have spent many years coaching employees does not necessarily mean that you are any good at it ...

All organisations are striving to improve employee productivity in order to grow overall business performance and corporate value. Coaching employees provides counsel in real time and clearly identifies goals in the context of the employee's job. Leadership best practice tells us to coach early and often - early, to catch potential problems before they happen, and often, because continuous interest and feedback virtually guarantee better performance. How do we make the transition from once-a-year reviews and appraisals to an atmosphere of coaching?

Every management or leadership position includes an element of coaching. The good coach has many of these traits. A great coach has all of them. Work at developing these traits and become a GREAT coach.

There is good evidence to show that mentoring programs can deliver multiple benefits. However, programs differ and one that is perfect for another organisation may not be right for your business. So how do you develop a mentoring program that is right for you?

Business coaching is becoming one of the most effective business tools to improve performance, and where it works well, results can be seen within days of the coaching session. Coaching as a technique though, is full of myths. The purpose of this article is to eradicate these common myths - and show you exactly what coaching can do to improve your performance at work.

“Coaching” used to be a popular approach for derailing executives or professionals whose performance needed a lot of work. Got a problem? Get a coach. However, increasingly, coaching is being sought by some of the most successful executives in their field – those who want to get even better at their business game. So the new thinking is... Got a goal? Get a coach.